Not Exactly a Brahmin (12 page)

I walked the remaining blocks to my car, finished the five tries getting it out of the space, and drove to the liquor store smiling. Ten minutes later I had used Howard’s Visa to pay for his liquor and arrived at California Costumery.

No place is as mobbed as a costume store the day before Halloween. California Costumery occupied a small showroom, with a large dressing room behind it and a storage area to the right. The showroom was a ten-foot wooden square sporting an old display case filled with noses, beaks, and snouts, bunny tails and bow ties, pointed ears, floppy ears, and mustaches of all colors. On the wall were rubbery masks of Father Time, Ebenezer Scrooge, of gorillas, goblins, purple-faced spooks, and witches in pasty white. Above them perched rebel hats, cowboy hats, fedoras, and rainbow-head wigs. Standing in the corner were canes, bludgeons (presumably of crepe paper and tin foil), broomsticks, and a selection of tails that would have inspired Beelzebub.

And in the room were at least twenty people with looks of such desperation that Halloween costumes hardly seemed necessary.

I took a number and settled under the sign that prohibited checks during the Halloween rush.

A man of about twenty at the desk was explaining that nothing but a bald head with an orange fringe of hair would do. He already had a Day-Glo black T-shirt.

I figured I’d be here awhile. I might as well do that ordering of my thoughts that I had passed over at the station. Back to the basics on the Palmerston case—Who gained? Lois inherited. She had no money of her own (as far as I knew—I would have to check further on that). But Nina and Jeffrey Munson both said, loosely translated, that she had become acclimated to wealth. Maybe she could do without Ralph, but not without his money.

The bald-and-orange-wigged man moved on and was replaced by three women with urges to be Stooges. They, the harried clerk told them, were in luck. She called to a woman and pointed the three to the dressing room.

Jeffrey, the anxious lover? He might want to kill Ralph Palmerston, but why choose now?

At the counter, a tall man asked to be done as a king. “Where I’m going,” he said, “there’ll be plenty of queens.”

What about Nina murdering Ralph? That didn’t make sense. You don’t kill a man because his wife hasn’t called you.

“Miss?”

I looked up.

“Can I help you?”

I stood up. “I’m sorry. I thought there were so many people ahead of me.”

The clerk, a young black woman wearing a halo and glitter-covered cape, laughed. “You got a dragon there. Like Chinese New Year. All seven of them. I tell you, it’s going to be a long night for the dudes in the middle.”

“Probably for everyone else, too. I hope they’re not going where I am.”

“What can I get you?” She glanced over my body and I had the feeling she was playing a private guessing game as to whether I would be half a horse or Marie Antoinette.

“I’m here to pick up a costume. The name’s Seth Howard.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You Seth Howard?”

“No.”

“Sorry. We can’t give costumes to anyone but the customer. See?” She pointed to a sign under the one forbidding checks. “We’ve got our customer’s trust to uphold.”

“I understand. But he got caught up and asked me to pick it up for him.”

“Sorry. No exceptions.” She pointed to the sign again.

I pulled out Howard’s Visa card and his note authorizing me to use it, and handed them to her. “He’ll appreciate your precautions. And he wouldn’t trust anyone but me with the costume.”

She studied the note, then handed it and the card back to me. “Okay. Seth Howard. Hang on.” She floated past me, sparkling cape flying out behind her.

I smiled. The really fine thing about getting Howard’s costume this way was that he himself had made it possible. Should I leave it at his house with a note—just my name? But I knew I couldn’t wait. I’d take it back to our office now and plop it in his lap. Then I’d go out and move my car into his garage.

Still smiling, I looked around. In the near corner of the dressing room a Quasimodo hump expanded on the back of a five-foot-six man. From the doorway the dragon stuck its head out, then pulled it back abruptly and collapsed to the floor. Six bare legs were visible. A voice reiterated, “It’s got to be coordinated, dummy. Right foot first.”

It was a few minutes before the clerk returned, looking more harried than before. “No,” she said.

“Not ready?”

“Not here. You were so certain, so I checked all our files. You must have the wrong place. There’s no costume for a Seth Howard. No one ordered one. No one picked one up. No one canceled one. This Seth Howard ought to get his head straight before he sends people chasing around.”

“Are you sure?”

“I just told you—”

“I know, I know. Maybe it’s my fault. Where else do they rent costumes?”

“They may have some left in San Francisco.”

“None in the East Bay?”

“Halloween comes only once a year. How many people you think it can support?”

I shrugged. “Thanks.”

“Sure.”

“Damn,” I muttered as I walked outside. “Damn, damn.” If his costume wasn’t here, where could it be? He had to be having it made privately. And if that was the case, there was no way I could find it. I couldn’t call every seamstress in the Bay Area. I’d better just save my money for a new pair of running shoes.

When I got back to the station, I looked for Pereira, but she was out. I checked my IN box, hoping for another note from her. But what I found was a message from the Detective Division secretary:
Inspector Doyle wants to see you at 2:00.

D
ETECTIVE
I
NSPECTOR
F
REDERICK
D
OYLE
had been in charge of Homicide Detail before I had joined the force, long before the proposition of being a cop had even occurred to me. Compared to Oakland and San Francisco, we didn’t have many murders in Berkeley, even with this latest spurt of killings (most of them were drug-related, it was turning out). But Doyle kept his eye on every investigation. And our record of File Closed’s was impressive. Unsolved cases ate at him. He was reputed to be able to list them all, all the way back to the sixties. And he was said to be able to name the officers who had failed to solve them.

I’d met the inspector, of course. He’d interviewed me for the Homicide position. But I had yet to present a case to him. Now, at one-thirty, I wished that I had stayed in and dictated reports on my morning interviews instead of wasting my time at California Costumery. Inspector Doyle wouldn’t have expected that—it would be unrealistic—but it would have looked good. Barring that, at least I could decide what to emphasize—which suspect, which lead—when I talked to him.

But before I could reach for my pad, there was a knock on the door. Almost simultaneously it opened and Clayton Jackson’s head jutted around the edge. “You in, Detective?”

“Yeah, but I’m boning up to see Doyle in half an hour.”

Jackson ambled in and plopped into Howard’s chair. Clayton Jackson was one of the two regular Homicide detectives. He had been in Homicide when I started on the force four years ago. I had the impression he had been new to it then, but I wasn’t sure. With the other Homicide man, Al Eggenberger, “Eggs” of course, Jackson made an unusual pairing. Eggs was in his mid-thirties, blond, and looked more like an MBA than a cop. In contrast, Clayton Jackson was the blackest man I’d ever seen. He was a bit short of six feet, barrel-chested, and, to take him at his word, could stare down any con in Alameda County.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve got a philanthropist murdered before he could go blind, a wife who inherits, and a note in the glove compartment saying Shareholders Five, a group that, according to Herman Ott—”

Jackson groaned.

“—included Adam Thede, who owns that health food breakfast place on the avenue.” I described the rest of the case to him.

“Yet and still,” he said, “you’ve got the wife. Two to one the wife offed him.”

“She’s a strange woman—about twenty years younger than him. Beautiful—thin, blond, aristocratic, every hair in place. She came out here for no decently explained reason. Before that she worked as an actresses in New York, but she can’t remember the name of her longest-running play.”

“Actress, huh? Actresses can take in a lot. Did the lady say she was acting on the stage or on the sheets?”

“She didn’t say at all. But any actress I’ve met could tell you every role she’d ever had, and probably every line she spoke. The only job Mrs. Palmerston could remember was at Bloomingdale’s.”

“Maybe she had a rich daddy.”

“She went to college on a scholarship.”

“So what you’re saying, Smith, is she had no money, she didn’t make no money, she didn’t bring no money with her, and then—Wham!—she buys a Mercedes and moves to Pacific Heights. If she’s not peddling ass, then you spell that c-o-c-a-i-n-e, with a capital D for dealing.”

“Could be. I guess I’m going to have to contact NYPD to see what they know.”

“Don’t hold your breath, Smith.”

“Right. It won’t be a high priority for them.”

Jackson leaned back in the chair. It lurched. Jackson jerked forward, and laughed. “This sure is Howard’s chair; like a man’s favorite dog, it don’t suit no one else.”

I nodded. Jackson’s strength was in his chest. Howard’s was in his long legs. No one swivel chair could accommodate them both. “The thing is, Clay, there are all these—not even loose ends—strands that don’t come anywhere near each other. There’s Lois Palmerston. Maybe she was a call girl. Maybe she was dealing. Either one makes sense. But what does that have to do with her husband’s brake lines being cut? From what her friends say, she freeloaded off them for years then dumped them as soon as she’d bagged money. Not pleasant, but not unheard of. Friends don’t kill over that. And then there’s Shareholders Five—a group that Palmerston hired Herman Ott to investigate so he could do something nice for each member.”

Jackson snorted. “Nice, huh?”

I shrugged. “I quote Ott.”

“
Nice
doesn’t usually come before murder. Nice doesn’t go with Herman Ott.”

“Yeah, well …”

“You say this guy Palmerston’s been involved with charity for years? You’d think he would know how to be nice without paying Herman Ott to tell him.”

“In any case he didn’t do anything good for Adam Thede. And whoever the other four Shareholders are, Herman Ott’s not about to tell me.”

Now it was Jackson’s turn to nod. “Then you’re not going to find out, not from him. I’ve held off three guys with knives in an alley, but I’ve never gotten Ott to tell me anything he didn’t have to.”

“It just makes me so mad. He knows who those other four people are—he denies it, of course. Damn!”

“Yet and still, Smith, you’ve got the wife. You got a lot to dig around with there.” He stood up, pointedly looking at his watch. It was quarter to two.

I watched him walk out, then looked down at my closed note pad. I considered reviewing my notes, but the interviews had been only this morning. Instead, I wrote out the request for anything NYPD had on Lois Burk, now Lois Palmerston. Then I called information and got the number for Binghamton College, Lois’s alma mater. It was ten to two, ten to five Eastern time. The financial aid office staff should still be in.

I deliberated briefly whether to try a subterfuge. Bureaucrats, even in little bureaucracies, are not anxious to give information to the police. But no one other than a police officer or a bill collector would have called a college for the facts I needed.

I was put on hold twice, but at the end of that wait, a voice—clearly an old voice—came on.

“Miss Lowell here. May I help you?”

“I’m from the Berkeley, California, police. I need some information about one of your former scholarship students.”

“All our students are treated alike. Money makes no difference.”

“It’s the repayment of the scholarship I’m interested in. The woman I just spoke to—”

“Miss Grimes.”

“Miss Grimes said you were in charge of those records.”

“Have been for thirty years.”

“Wonderful. You must know every scholarship student.”

“I do. But I can’t give out information about them. Our records are confidential.”

Damn. “I’m sure. And I wouldn’t ask you to violate your regulations. I
am
a police officer; I’m sworn to uphold the law. I just wanted to know if you recognized the name Lois Burk?”

There was a long pause. I could picture a gray-haired lady pressing her lips together.

“I’m not asking you if she was on scholarship. I know she was.”

I could hear her breathing.

“She graduated twelve years ago,” I prompted.

Her breath was sharper.

“Students on scholarship, full scholarship, are also expected to work and to carry loans, right? You can tell me that.”

“Yes,” she snapped.

“And repayment is to begin a year after the student leaves college?”

When she didn’t reply, I said, “This is just general information I’m asking for.”

Her breath was shorter. “Yes,” she snapped again. “We give them a whole year after their final semester of college, whether that be a bachelor’s or a master’s degree, or a doctorate. They have an entire year before they have to pay one cent.”

“And some of them don’t pay?”

“No, they don’t. They take our money with open hands, but when it comes to paying it back, that’s another story, I can tell you.”

“And there’s not much way of forcing them, is there?”

“We write to them, remind them of their responsibility, tell them that there are students who need that money, but they don’t care. They’ve gotten what they need, they don’t think about those who come after them.”

“Of course, there are collection agencies …?” I left the question open, pleased that I had been able to tap into her outrage.

“For a long time the board didn’t want to stoop to collection agencies. They didn’t like to think our students were the kind to be badgered by bill collectors. But when I showed the board the financial statement, even they saw that there was very little difference between some of our fine upwardly mobile graduates, and deadbeats.”